The present invention relates to video production, and more particularly to a video image bank that provides thousands of stock footage image sequences for immediate use by the producer of a video tape in preparing a story board and/or edit tape.
Television is a commonplace part of people's lives, and unless the video viewed is exciting people become bored. They expect all video to be up to the quality of normal broadcast programming. The cost of producing broadcast quality programming for a small producer, such as for industrial and training tapes, is quite high. Even attempts to highlight industrial productions by interjecting exciting stock footage are insufficient because the time and cost involved limits the use. Further the cost of just maintaining a library of such stock footage is in itself quite expensive for a small producer, as it requires many different reels of video tape to be maintained. These tapes are difficult and time consuming to use since, even if indexed, the tapes have to be searched for the desired footage before that footage can be edited into a production tape. As the video market continues to grow the need for inexpensive means of production continues to expand. The standard way of cutting production costs has been the use of stock footage, but the cost and time involved in locating and acquiring stock footage is a major problem for the small producer.
A related problem for the small producer, especially in the industrial production area, is that the producer is used to writing out copy, but is unfamiliar or uncomfortable with video concepts. Therefore such productions based upon such written copy tend to be stilted with all the drawbacks of non-broadcast quality video.
Therefore, what is desired is an apparatus for storing stock video footage in a compact, random access manner so that any footage desired may be retrieved virtually instantaneously to reduce the expense of storing the footage and the expense of producing video tapes that are interjected with such stock footages, including the ability to use written copy as an index into the stored stock video footage.